This year's Ubuntu Developer Summit was held at Budapest in Hungary. There were a lot of interesting developments regarding Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" which is scheduled for release in October 2011. In this article, we list the most important news from the Ubuntu Developer Summit Oneiric.

200 million users in 4 years

In the opening keynote, Mark Shuttleworth announced that the goal of Ubuntu is 200 million users in four years. This announcement sure did kick off the summit with a bang. Shuttleworth's ambitious announcement was noticed by many and sure made the summit noticed.

Will Canonical be able to achieve that target? We have no way of knowing right now but with more huge changes coming up for Ubuntu, it looks like a very steep target.

GDM will be replaced by LightDM

One of the most significant changes in Ubuntu 11.10 could be the replacement of the GNOME Display Manager by LightDM. LightDM is much easier to maintain and has the added advantages that it is faster and is more themeable.

You can read more about in this article.

Thunderbird might be included in place of Evolution

Something which a lot of people had been calling for might become true in Ubuntu 11.10. Thunderbird might finally replace Evolution as the default email client.

The decision is not yet final because Thunderbird, currently, does not have the level of integration into GNOME that the Ubuntu developers desire. Works are already underway and we might see Thunderbird shipped with Ubuntu 11.1o.

Deja Dup to be included by default

The backup tool, Deja Dup, will be included in Ubuntu 11.10 by default. Deja Dup was chosen over the other backup tools because of its polish and simplicity. Backing up and setting up backup schedules in Deja Dup requires just a few mouse clicks - perfect for Ubuntu's target users.

No more GNOME Classic Desktop

In Ubuntu 11.04, the GNOME Classic Desktop was provided as a fallback if Unity does not work. With the next release, the GNOME Classic Desktop will be removed completely. In its place, Unity 2D will be used in case the system cannot run Unity 3D.

Unity 2D is also available for Ubuntu 11.04, although not installed by default. Refer to this article to install Unity 2D in Ubuntu 11.04.

Ubuntu will finally move to GNOME 3

Although GNOME 3 had already been released by the time Ubuntu 11.04 was released, it was not used. With the next version, however, Ubuntu will move from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3. Moving to GNOME 3 might bring some new features but Ubuntu 11.10 will not use the GNOME Shell. Ubuntu will use Unity on top of the GNOME 3 stack.